“The Cobb County School Board moved to terminate its contract with Apple Computer late Sunday based on an investigation that found that the school system ‘deceived’ the public in choosing the company to supply it with thousands of laptops,” Kristina Torres reports for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Torres reports that Kessler’s findings included:
• Apple got the contract even though it appears the company did not initially make the final cut of companies to be considered.
• Central Office staff “refused to tell the truth” to Kessler’s investigators. “The responses by the personnel conveyed misleading information in certain aspects and false information in others,” the report stated. “Those responsible clearly wanted to create a false impression of the results of the negotiation to justify thier decision.”
• There were “discrepancies” in record-keeping to tie the deal together.
Torres reports, “The move, approved unanimously Sunday, will likely give critics ammunition in their call for Superintendent Joseph Redden to resign. Redden wanted to provide students with take home laptops, prompting his staff to consider Apple and three other competetitors for the job.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, the guy made sure that Apple’s lower Total Cost of Operation would be in the running amid all of low initial sticker price champs that he knew would light the ignorant-to-such-matters’ hearts afire down in Cobb? So, he wanted a chance at providing his students the world’s most advanced operating system, instead of the world’s most porous? So, he wanted people to be able to look at Apple Mac machines that would offer students iLife ’05 versus the type of “iLifeless” machines (for example: Dell, Gateway, Acer) whose whole reason for existence is a failed attempt to be like a Mac, but cheaper? Are those such bad things? Who would want an intelligent and informed Superintendent like that to resign? They ought to give him a medal, a raise, and let him buy Apple iBooks with Mac OSX Tiger, the best portable computers for students.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Cobb County school board pulls plug on 63,000 Apple iBooks plan – August 02, 2005
Judge shuts down 63,000 Apple iBooks for Cobb County students – July 29, 2005
One Cobb County Apple iBook audit expected to finish soon – July 27, 2005
Inquiry into Cobb County Apple iBook bids requested – July 14, 2005
Cobb County iBook saga: allegations that school leaders pressured employees to pick Apple – July 11, 2005
Lawsuit to halt Cobb County’s 63,000 Apple iBooks for education plan goes to court today – July 08, 2005
Cobb County’s Apple iBooks in schools saga continues with lawsuit – June 04, 2005
Lawsuit filed to stop Cobb County’s Apple iBook program – June 01, 2005
Cobb County school board approves Apple Mac plan; could eventually distribute 63,000 iBooks – April 29, 2005
Henrico school board dumps Apple Macs, picks Dells with Windows – April 29, 2005
Cobb County school officials intend to move forward with Apple iBook program – April 21, 2005
Cobb Commission chief urges delay in Apple iBook program, says issue has become too emotional – April 20, 2005
No conflict of interest in ongoing Cobb County Apple iBook saga – April 19, 2005
More controversy in Atlanta-area school district’s plan to buy Apple iBooks – April 16, 2005
Cobb County Georgia approves first phase of plan that could equip schools with 63,000 Apple iBooks – April 15, 2005
Atlanta-area school district on verge of deal for 31,000 Apple iBooks – April 12, 2005
Cobb teachers voice concerns over using Macs for proposed laptop program – March 29, 2005
Cobb County Georgia meeting discusses plan to equip schools with 63,000 Apple iBooks – February 24, 2005
Report: 90 percent of emails opposed to Georgia’s Apple iBook program – February 10, 2005
65,000 Apple iBooks for Georgia schools one of the largest school laptop programs in the country – February 10, 2005
Georgia school district to propose 63,000 Macs for students and teachers – February 07, 2005
Well, fair enough, the guy felt that Apple would be the best overall option, even if on the face of thing they weren’t the cheapest.
However, that doesn’t make up for the fact that he tried to cover this up. If he’d been open and honest, then fair enough.
Redden Lied! PCs Died!
Giving dumbass students a laptop is ridiculous. That money would be much better used for teacher training and textbooks.
Yeah, if the guy lied, that is wrong. Choosing Apple by deceiving the public, lying to the school board, and using backdoor deals is not the way a Superintendent should run his position. While it’s a shame the program is stopped, the guy deserves to be punished.
BUT… the fact that Apple is tied to this fiasco will reflect badly on them. and it seems that the press makes sure that the name of the computer company (ie: Apple) is put boldly forward in every article. if the computers were from a pc maker i dont think that would have happened.
paranoid, perhaps? mebbe just a little.
There’s more to it than has been made public. He did not decieve, the decievers are the other manufacturers who have lied to everyone for years about TCO and quality.
The board should resign.
Students don’t need laptops with iLife on them. They need solid updated computer labs where they can be supervised. They need this time to be marked out for learning valuable computer skills, not downloading custom icons and messing around with iTunes for hours on end. There’s no reason in the world for this huge waste of money, Apple or not. I’ll buy my children the computer I want them to have, and will keep moving them away from any school that tries to force some laptop on them. Look at the Kutztown 13. Who needs that sort of nonsense in their lives?
Teaching children that the internet is a valuable researrch tool is one thing, but having them tethered to wireless networks with laptops is silly. They could combine that 900 dollars a child into say, a g5 tower for every three kids and then cut that in half because most of the students will stagger the use of the labs by class schedule. Since they won’t be screwing around day after day with these machines there’s a good chance they will value the time they have to use the machines and get more done on them….
I’m no expert though.
The end does not justify the means. Not in this case. Not in any case. Regardless of whether that case says IBM, Microsoft or Apple.
I have to agree with Tom Strong that whatever the laptop is costing could probably be better spent elsewhere in a school system. Training, books, supplies… Time and again, technology has been shown to not “magically” improve education.
MDN, are you defending the actions of someone that misleads, misrepresents, lies and deceives? Apple is that valuable to you to sacrifice moral judgment? He deserves a medal for that? I suppose you’re republicans, too, then, so there’s no talking sense to you…
We all have rules and guidelines we have to follow. If it were a private school that he were in charge of he might have the ability to enforce a personal mandate, but that’s not the case.
We all know OS X is better than windows and the laptops are better for anyone, but get off your fscking soapbox and encouraging people to lie, cheat and steal for your bread & butter!
No computers in schools.
Teach children to read a real book and write using pencil, pen and paper. No book reports or papers done using computers. Everything done by hand by the student.
Draw with paints and crayons, not pixels.
Do I smell a payoff? A little bribe or two? A sweet kickback in the works?
Gosh o mighty.
But if it gets a Mac sale it´s okay, right MDN???
You idiots blindly believe what this reporter has written. If you’ve ever know anyone who’s been arrested you only read the cop’s version in the patpers. It’s total BS. There are always two sides to every story. Don’t believe this crap. This reeks of MS-Dell people making sure this deal didn’t go through. I guarantee something very slimey went on to kill the Apple deal!
Yeah, let the lynch mob rule. The Superintendent did the job and selected the best platform for TCO and is getting fried by the losers. IF DELL and company want to win school contracts, they have to compete on more than just lowest price. Let’s talk about viruses, hardware failures, service and support, durability….. need I go on?
The COBB County judiciary is acting like a bunch of backwoods rednecks who didn’t get enough schooling to begin with….. Maybe they should go back to running moonshine, and leave the technological decisions to those who understand the marketplace.
Are they even taking into account the IT costs that the other “competitors” would have had associated with them? Antivirus software? People are so stupid.
Wow,
I am amazed at some of the responses to this article. The termination of this contract with Apple really only hurts one group – The students who would have benefitted from the use of these laptops. The notion of every student having a laptop is not wasteful, but simply the future. The concept of students having access to their “own” computer (laptop or workstation, Mac or otherwise), will be the future “norm” for many, if not all, schools – not a matter of “If” but only “When”. Think about the students who might not have access to a computer or the internet at home? What kind of a disadvantage could have been avoided with providing everyone with an even playing ground of laptops?
It’s too bad that this opportunity for Apple to shine in this venture has been stopped. The notion of the public witnessing the direct impact that an Apple iBook would have had on that many students could have been dazzling! That it has been thwarted by mere politics is really, really sad.
As I understood it, the Board had given a general guideline for what they were going to provide the students, but in the time since it was outlined to the taxpayers, they deviated only by deciding to use laptops (instead or workstations), and deciding to use Apple’s instead of some other inferior brand of machine. Is that really a deception? They were still providing computers to the students, and had only (arguably) deviated slightly from their original proposal. I was amazed when I first heard of this proposal years back – it seemed so forward thinking and an astonishing turn for any given school board to take for the benefit of their student (and teaching) body. It’s a tragedy that it has come to this.
I think most people here would agree that the user experience of using a Mac over a PC is vastly superior, and that the productivity of any given student would be far greater on a Mac. The idea of students spending “hours on end” downloading music from the internet is somewhat ridiculous, as in any properly networked environment these activities could be monitored and prevented (and yet encouraged – legally of course – once the student/teacher and the computer are at home.)
Anyway – my point is that this is a real shame. It would have been good press for Apple, and a strong new precedent for school systems around the country and indeed the world. But above all it would have been great for all of those students – some of which might not get the opportunity to use a tool that could (and would IMHO) be used to encourage and enrich their real world skills, foster creativity, and enrich their understanding of the curriculum for the which the machines were intended to augment.
Sad, Sad, Sad…
Cobb County- home of Newt Gingrich.
What more can be said
Give the money to the teachers. Teachers are underpaid, undertrained and under appreciated. My wife just went through a teacher certification at unnamed university. The state education baord should be drawn and quartered. The course was a farse. They taught the prospective teachers absolutley nothing about teaching, being a teacher, and how to command a class room.
Teachers need real support and leadership. Politics like these laptop programs are just another way to fail to provide the fundamental to our kids.
I think everyone aught to have a laptop. Macs are certainly better, but if I’m going to give out $400 or more a year per student in additional funding I think it would be better spent on sending the teachers and adminitration to leadership training and a whole lot of other programs that can keep giving years beyond an iBook and effect far more kids.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Again, I live in a school district that has the only laptop program in the county , if not the whole state. It has been deemed a failure by most of the teachers I have talked to. The scores of the students are no higher than in other districts. In fact, this is supposed to be the last year of this program.
The one thing I don’t understand is that all the desktops in the district are Macs, but they went with Dells and ThinkPads for the laptops. And the breakdown rate for these is atrocious.
And the laptops are stripped down to bare bones software. There is no guarantee that an iBook would have iLife to impress the uninformed.
While the choice of Apple was a wise and intelligent decision, laptops of any brand are still not the end-all, be-all solution to better education.
macoholic equals terrorist!
I think the board should resign instead for there stupidity.
This is really a shame for everyone involved. I agree with izod, I don’t think the actions of the superintendent and his staff were as nefarious as this articles paints them to be. It sounds to me like the citizens got wind of the fact that they were planning to buy “those expensive Apple computers that aren’t as fast and don’t have any software available” and got all bent out of shape about it. Also, I bet within a year those kids have Dells.
You can argue about whether or not kids need laptops, although I agree that it’s only a matter of time before it’s the norm. What’s more important in my mind is that they have Macs. My wife is a teacher and her school is all Windows. She had to call me the other day to help get her printer working because XP just decided it didn’t want to see it anymore. It was fine in the morning, no one touched it for hours, but in the afternoon the printer driver somehow disappeared. She needed to print some stuff before the end of the day, but because the school system can’t afford to have IT staff in every school, she had to call me. Otherwise she’d have to place a work order and the IT staff MIGHT get out there within six weeks if she’s lucky. This is just the latest in a long list of problems she’s had with her Windows boxes. In my opinion, Windows has no business in schools. They’d be better off having no computer at all.
I agree with Qman and g3m4nn.
Being from GA I’d love to see Apple win this deal but there is no evidence that having notebooks would actually improve learning. US kids test scores are low compared to kids of other developed nations. Getting kids notebooks isn’t going to improve that.
Upgrade computer labs in schools and and let the kids spend time there instead. Not sure teenagers are responsible enough to take good care of a sensitive piece of equipment such as notebook
The deal went sour from the very beginning and it deserved to be shut down. You can’t mess around with people’s tax dollars.
Funnily, in this old interview Steve Jobs pointed out the education issues and how computers aren’t that crucial at all:
http://www.geocities.com/franktau/interviewpart1.html
MDN is really missing the whole point here. The issue isn’t what platform the kids’ computers are, if they’re given computers at all. It’s public officials’ accountability to their community and the taxpayers funding this proposal, who from the outset were deceived about the program. People here can fume about a Microsoft/Dell conspiracy all they want (and I seriously doubt either Microsoft or Dell give a $hit about Cobb County). The people in charge violated laws and guidelines and deceived taxpayers, and the program should be axed and the violators punished. Just because Apple’s involved doesn’t change that there’s a right and wrong way to get things accomplished.