{"id":7626,"date":"2015-04-06T12:25:58","date_gmt":"2015-04-06T16:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/?p=7626"},"modified":"2026-03-03T14:41:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T22:41:47","slug":"los-angeles-unified-school-district","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/?p=7626","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Unified School District"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following entry is a record in the \u201cCatalogue of Catastrophe<\/a>\u201d \u2013\u00a0a list of failed or troubled projects from around the world.<\/p>\n

\n

Los Angeles Unified School District\u00a0<\/strong>–\u00a0USA
\nProject type :\u00a0<\/strong>e-Enabled learning tools
\nProject name :<\/strong>\u00a0Instructional Technology Initiative
\nDate :<\/strong>\u00a0Apr 2015\u00a0 Cost :\u00a0<\/strong>$1.3B<\/p>\n

Synopsis :<\/strong>
\nBringing equal opportunity to students from all economic backgrounds is a noble and justifiable goal, but having a noble goal doesn’t make a project\u00a0any easier. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s efforts to provide every student, every teacher and every administrator with a iPad turned into a debacle that has fingers pointing and red faces across the board. Launched in 2013, the initial\u00a0plan called for more than 100,000 iPads to be purchased. Some were to be loaded with apps containing curriculum that would be used for instructional purposes while others were to be used for standardized testing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Ipad – Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic – Source: M Yoshihito.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From the initial rollout the problems were clear. Students were quickly able to bypass the built in security to\u00a0access non-authorized content while the authorized content that was provided suffered its own quality problems. Reports indicate that\u00a0the authorized content was not written in accordance with applicable teaching standards and those problems were compounded by the fact that the system suffered reliability problems that frequently rendered the content inaccessible anyway. \u00a0The project’s Director publicly criticized\u00a0the system saying “Making the materials ‘usable’ has required extraordinary, unsustainable, and un-scalable resources.\u201d Publishing an open correspondence<\/a> the Director reports that only\u00a02 of 69 schools in the initial pilot were still attempting to use the tool. The remaining schools had given up. Noting that less than 5% of the target student body had reliable access to the content, the letter\u00a0also noted that even when used, the content failed to meet all appropriate requirements.<\/p>\n

Contributing factors as reported in the press:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Failure\u00a0to gain stakeholder support, missing requirements, quality related issues, failure to fully recognize the transformational shift in learning that e-enabled learning represents.<\/p>\n

Other related projects :<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. LAUSD Pay-role system failure 2007\u00a0<\/a>\u2013\u00a0The Los Angeles School District has\u00a0the somewhat dubious distinction of appearing in the Catalogue of Catastrophe twice!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Reference links :<\/strong><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. US schools seek refund over $1.3bn iPad project<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. What Schools Must Learn From LA\u2019s iPad Debacle<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      The following entry is a record in the \u201cCatalogue of Catastrophe\u201d \u2013\u00a0a list of failed or troubled projects from around the world. Los Angeles Unified School District\u00a0–\u00a0USA Project type :\u00a0e-Enabled learning tools Project name :\u00a0Instructional Technology Initiative Date :\u00a0Apr 2015\u00a0 Cost :\u00a0$1.3B Synopsis : Bringing equal opportunity to students from all economic backgrounds is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3,77],"tags":[97,100,130,129,93,147],"class_list":["post-7626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-failed-project","category-why-projects-fail","tag-examples-of-failed-it-project","tag-examples-of-failed-projects","tag-government","tag-failed-project","tag-why-do-projects-fail","tag-why-projects-fail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7626"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10059,"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7626\/revisions\/10059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calleam.com\/WTPF\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}