Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

I think schools need to just give parents $1000 and have them buy and maintain and insure devices directly.

My county school system bought a bunch of crappy Lenovos three years ago and now they are really bad. Disk failures. Battery lasts an hour so students have to constantly charge all day (20 kids running cables every 55 minutes).

And they have lots of weird systems and sites that are hard coded to only run on these laptops.

And the school doesn’t have people to maintain or debug or patch so it’s a weird situation where 5th graders are supposed to call tech support in the middle of a school day to figure out why something is working.

And it has weird policies where if your laptop was stolen you had to reimburse the county the purchase price. So if your Lenovo that you could probably eBay for $100 was stolen you had to pay $1299 or something strange. The first repair was free, the second $100, the third $300. And since no one understood computers they would make rulings that any damage was caused by the student (a 10 year old).

After about a year, I noped out and just bought a MacBook Air for $800 with AppleCare ($80/year) to insure against damage or theft. This works well except for the times when they have special web sites that only work on the Lenovo.

I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but I think school was better with everything on paper. But at least we didn’t buy chromebooks.

> I think school was better with everything on paper.

I'm pretty sure writing notes on paper is better for learning. Something about engaging more of the brain through motor skills.

Indeed.

Developing fine motor control is fundamental for developing cognitive skills.

Dude 90% of parents do not have the time, skill, or energy to maintain their kids devices.

Dude, every parent has to maintain the device anyway as the school doesn’t. Thus my story about being on the phone with “tech support.”

And I’d imagine 100% of parents don’t have the time.

I feel like all of these problems would be resolved if the school had just bought Chromebooks. It's cheaper for the district to treat $200 Chromebooks as disposables than it is to get a MacBook air for $800 with $80/year AppleCare for a decade. Not to mention ridiculously simpler for the school to manage from a software and support side.

The company I'm at does a ton in network refreshes in the education space from E-Rate (government funding) for K-12 to ritzy universities. I've seen everything from Windows devices to iPads to Chromebooks to Android tablets to MacBooks and the schools using Chromebooks for assigned devices as throwaways always have the least trouble.

Shit parents will just buy themselves a laptop

Or meth

I'm sure it will be a non-zero amount but not sure how many parents there are that do meth that still have their kids. Probably not that many.

You would be absolutely shocked.

It is a very nontrivial amount in rural America.

What's a nontrivial amount? How many families?

I mean I cannot quantify it exactly, but I just know in the mid sized town that I grew up in, my mother worked at a middle school and later an elementary school, and I briefly worked at the middle school. In a class of probably 200 kids, I would say 40 or so kids had active drug users as parents maybe 15 were meth, 15 crack/coke, and the remainder a smattering of other substances.

Also a lot of parents with gang involvement. One kids house got riddled with automatic gunfire in the middle of the night as part of a gang retaliation. :/ kid was fine but, damn. The situation here in certain places in the USA is truly dire.

There is just no way that 7% of parents in the US are using meth, or even 10% are using drugs (outside of alcohol, tobacco, weed). There just is no way that is accurate at all.

I didn't say that. I said that at the school that I worked at, those are the rough numbers. While this is not the norm, it is not unusual in rural American schools.'

The national average, however, is obviously not close at all. There are probably many entire districts where the number is 0

>5th graders are supposed to call tech support in the middle of a school day to figure out why something is working.

I'll presume to assume the above was meant to say 'something isn't working', but it makes so much more sense as written.

Yes, thanks. Meant “isn’t working” and I typed that, but thanks to autocorrect, my phone changed it to “is working” and I didn’t notice until now.

I have to get in the habit of proof reading everything since I can’t rely on just typing specifically.

Text books are physically expensive and difficult to manage. A tablet or laptop, in theory, can reduce those costs to that of IP (if any). Even my kindergartner sometimes has to take home a bag full of books, the bag would be much lighter if it was just an iPad (which they also have, but don’t use for library books).

> Text books are physically expensive and difficult to manage. A tablet or laptop, in theory, can reduce those costs to that of IP (if any).

Plus the cost of the laptop or tablet of course.

I don't see how it's cheaper or easier; at my high school some classes used books that were over 20 years old; that was fine because the basics of things like science or language doesn't change that fast; f=ma is still f=ma, a verb is still a verb, etc. A laptop will last what, 3 or 4 years, at best?

Books require some maintenance and management, but it was one janitor doing it for all of the school, alongside his other duties. It's a job many could learn in a few weeks.

Maintaining laptops or tablets seems significantly harder and more expensive. We had several hundred students; that's probably at least one or two full-time high-knowledge employees instead of one part-time relatively low-knowledge worker.

The problem is managing those books, lockers kind of suck, Americans change classes rather than teachers, so you got to lug them around somehow. A lot of schools simply dump the problem on the student.

An iPad is pretty easy to maintain, and just a kid proof case around it, is pretty durable. The software to manage those iPads is pretty well developed as well.

> give parents $1000

Parents take $1000, kid still comes to school with no laptop, what happens next?

The draconian (and probably most effective) approach would be legal measures, but the perception there is almost certainly why schools end up making the calls on behalf of parents (which I think is your point).

Yeah, I'm guessing (as not a lawyer) that it's too hard to extract $1000 from someone if they're broke and already spent it. Some govt agencies have their ways, but I don't think schools do, which is maybe why nothing financial is entrusted to the parents.

Wish I could think of some basis to sue the vendor who locked education customers into using a specific model of laptop to access their software.

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