After the teachers in Los Angeles nearly went on yet another strike, they may want to study a recent scandal that reveals where some of the district’s money is going. According to a report in the Westside Current, a former Los Angeles Unified School District employee and technology vendor, Gautham Sampath, just pled “not guilty” to money-laundering charges after allegedly rerouting $3 million to LAUSD technical project manager Hong Peng to land a $22 million contract for his information software.
Assuming Peng is guilty in this instance — and the hilariously illiterate texts between her and Sampath would suggest she is — it is reasonable to conclude she has probably done the same with other tech vendors, paying gargantuan sums of taxpayer money for often shoddy, useless software and pocketing large sums for it. And she is far from the only person doing it. Sampath’s company, Innive, evidently has “government contracts in California and elsewhere in the country.” This means that all over the country, local and state governments are awarding multimillion-dollar bids to conmen with few legal repercussions.
To be clear, this is money that could have gone to teachers, counselors, and administrators. This is money that could have been kept by the homeowners paying extortion-level property taxes. This is money that families could have applied to alternative schooling options.
But instead, this kind of corruption continues to siphon away taxpayer money without anyone realizing it. Years ago, I wrote about the expenses that consume most of a school district’s budget, namely extracurriculars, special education, and disciplinary programs. What I should have added to this list was technology.
For the past couple of decades, school districts have raided their rainy day funds, issued bonds, and gone broke paying for iPads and Chromebooks, educational software, and specially trained personnel tasked with helping faculty use these products. And aside from a few district bureaucrats safely hidden in a nondescript office building that the district somehow owns, no one really knows how much any of this costs. Naturally, this lack of transparency makes it all too easy for embezzlement, laundering, and bribery.
Moreover, in my own experience of teaching high school English, most of these programs are usually worthless. I have no clue how much local districts are paying for so many research databases, note-taking apps, informational organizers, or AI tools, but I do know I never use them, nor do any of the teachers I’ve known.
Ironically, what’s worse than this useless software is the software we actually do have to use. Whether it involves recording grades, taking attendance, referring misbehavior, or compiling standardized assessment data for each student, these programs are, as a rule, terrible. They are poorly designed, convoluted, and frequently glitch and crash. Added to this are our online textbooks, which force users to click two dozen times through two dozen dropdown menus to open a particular text — and usually require a few periodic reboots afterward.
Considering the expense, inconvenience, and endless opportunities for fraud and waste, one would assume the educational benefits at least justify some of this, but in most cases, they do not. Studies have long shown that learning on a screen is far inferior to learning on paper. Along with the usual on-screen distractions that divert students from their work, researchers have found that people retain much less of what they read on a computer than they do with a book or packet. This is likely one of the biggest reasons that today’s high school graduates, even ones in advanced tracks, read less than ever before.
So if these programs actively hurt learning, why do the majority of school districts continue to incorporate them into their classes? I believe there are two main reasons. The first and primary reason is the money. There are countless tech vendors like Sampath and technology administrators like Peng making countless lucrative deals that no one (except maybe the FBI) even knows about. And the deals people do know about are taken as a given for any modern school district. After all, if every district implements a “1:1” policy that guarantees a laptop to every student, then the district that does not must be doing something wrong and possibly inequitable and illegal.
The other reason schools cling to their expensive devices is that they pacify students. Yes, my state finally implemented a phone ban in schools (which I celebrate here), but this has led to students now spending more time on their school-issued computers, usually playing games and watching movies. Thankfully, I no longer play whack-a-mole, taking up phones in class, but I do have to set up firewalls to keep my students from clicking away from their assignments to play Wordle (“it’s English related!”) or watch K-Pop Demon Hunters. Overall, this is an improvement from last year, but it’s far from ideal.
Nevertheless, I am aware that there are many other teachers who turn a blind eye to their students vegging on their Chromebooks, often with the tacit approval of administrators who desire peace and quiet. I could easily imagine that most students in supposedly good public school districts spend the majority of their days goofing off on their devices instead of doing any schoolwork. Sad as that is, it obviously makes the business of schooling much easier.
Outside of possibly sending one’s children to a tech-free classical school, as I have done, the only real solution to this problem is to return to basics and use paper. Educational technology has created more problems than it solved and has fundamentally compromised today’s K-12 instruction. The kids are distracted enough by everything around them (even without a smartphone), and districts already waste too much money. Although it might infuriate lazy educators and shameless scammers like Sampath and Peng, it’s time to ditch tech in the classroom once and for all.
