Why is this even a ting wherever this is(US?)? Mandating school kids use a platform owned by Google, a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting, feels like letting McDonalds's and Coca-Cola be in charge of the school cafeteria and educating kids about a balanced diet.
Am I taking crazy pills, or am I missing something and I misunderstood the situation?
You could be describing Microsoft in 2023, e.g. Chromium-based Edge, Windows 11 start menu ads, Xbox Live background services being integral to Windows even on government/corporate computers, the unholy marriage of Bing & OpenAI, Windows Live ID, outlook.com, every corporation being cool with putting their data into Azure/Office 365, etc.
In my country (and I assume it's similar in others), Microsoft has and traditionally always had schools, hospitals and governments, pretty much the whole public sector in tight grip.
There is a lengthy history behind that which includes numerous reasons.
Parent comment was making the comparison because GP pointed out the absurdity of forcing kids into Google ecosystem and exposing them to data harvesting.
When the original story was about MS and they behave in similar or the same ways, I believe that it's very relevant.
Two wrongs don't make one right though: students at a public school, their data as well as their mindshare, should not mandatorily be sold to the highest/lowest bidder.
I think a bigger question is why kids need laptops at all..
Only for the first 2-3 years, at which point it expires and the kids need a new laptop.
It's not like we're replacing healthy lunches with Coke.
It's either Chromebooks, or expensive, clunky, virus-prone, impossible-to-administer Windows PCs.
Aren't books and a bottom of the barrel PC with internet access all you need to learn those? Why a Chromebook? NUC PCs are cheaper and it's easier to replace the mouse and keyboard that kids break.
Because teachers aren't sysadmins, because even if they were they aren't going to admin 30 different laptops that the students have installed god-knows-what on.
This solution has to be military grade in reliability and simplicity and unless/until someone develops a hardware certification programme, a meaningful long-term-support plan, a remote administration solution, a security focused browser and a hosted identity system, all in a package that costs ~$200 new then it's going to be CrOS.
Don't forget the marketing spend needed even if you did tick the above boxes.
No one is complaining that their text-books are not turing complete, just stop viewing these devices as general purpose machines and view them as the child-focused-appliances that they are. Like Teslas.
The Danish data protection agency made some ruling against Google that ought to have meant, if the existing rules had been followed, that kids weren't allowed to use Chromebooks, but the schools said they couldn't teach kids without them, so the rules weren't followed.
Yes, it's great.
So the savings in hardware costs, reduced support costs, and the "it just works" design is pretty attractive to school districts. Who'd have thought a $180 laptop could be durable, useful, no crapware/malware/ransomware, and last a decade?
Sure it would be nice if it didn't depend on google, but nobody else was stepping up.
My kid has had three over the last decade, the last we paid $50 to keep when she graduated. It's still being used years later.
It's very enticing. There's no real competition. The closest is Microsoft but Windows machines are much more expensive to manage and have worse performance on low-end hardware.
Let's imagine what HN wants - a Linux laptop running Firefox and LibreOffice. You're not going to get fleet management features, collaborative document editing, or built-in classroom management tools. Kids are still going to Google to search for things (and use ChatGPT).
Why you ask?
As a school teacher I can see
- for ages no proper trained IT staff in schools
- I know better linux, rpi than them. Heck they read IT news from cnet.com
- managing+ security in local servers is very difficult
- money for space
- google edu is/was almost free
- HIPAA equivalent rules
- though everyone will talk and tell linux, libreoffice
- the polishing and consistency of chromeos is great (for cheap $150 laptop)
- ideally linux foundation or some one should have made a 'school appliance' but ...
Excuse me but how the hell is this a problem in Scandinavia? Don't you guys have the best schools in the world?
Even in Eastern Europe 20 years ago we had sys-admins in schools, and we were told that Scandinavian schools do it so much bater because they fund them the way the US funds its military.