Plans were announced last year to place iPads in the hands of all 640,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Image by flickingerbrad.
In the realm of education and technology, a central question that researchers and policymakers alike have been grappling with has been: why does there continue to be such vast amounts of resources invested in education technology and related initiatives without substantial evidence to suggest that the promises of such technologies and related initiatives are being fulfilled? By adopting a political economy approach, which examines the social, political and economic processes shaping the production, consumption, and distribution of resources including information and communication technologies (Mosco, 2009), we can begin to understand why and how the considerable zeal surrounding education technologies and the sustained investments persist. An exemplar case for this type of analysis, giving us a deeper understanding of the structural forces shaping the K-12 institutional circuits, would be the recent tech-centred incidents riddling the Los Angeles Unified School District. iPad-for-all and the MiSiS CriSiS Last month the Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent, John Deasy, and Chief Technology Officer, Ron Chandler, both resigned due to the $1 billion iPad initiative and what is being called the MiSiS CriSiS. Underpinning these initiatives are idealistic beliefs in the powers of technology and the trend towards the standardisation and corporatization of the US K-12 education. Despite the dire need for classroom upgrades and recovery from the recession-induced mass teacher layoffs and library closures, this past year John Deasy announced the plan to direct the district’s resources toward an initiative that places iPads in all 640,000 LAUSD students’ hands. Perpetuating the idealistic promise that technology acts as a leveling tool in society, Deasy pledged that this initiative would afford equal educational opportunities across the board regardless of race or socioeconomic background of students. He stated that this would allow low-income students to have access to the same technological tools as their middle class counterparts. Commendable as the effort was, this overly idealised sentiment that technology will ameliorate the deeply rooted systemic inequities facing society…