Back in 2014, the headlines around Apple and K–12 education revolved around the cancellation of a major contract with the Los Angeles United School District. When Apple announced the contract in early 2014, there was a lot of excitement around the project. The approved deal allotted $115 million for deploying between 40,000 and 70,000 tablets to classrooms for use by students and teachers. One of the main drivers behind the project was standardized testing. As someone who just finished up another year of standardized testing on iPad (and getting back the results immediately), I can empathize at the benefits of using the device for testing. The LAUSD project ended up being a massive failure. We covered it extensively throughout the process, and while there were a lot of mistakes, I want to look at it from a technical point of view to explain the LAUSD iPad hacking scandal.
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