It was just two years ago that Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 rolled out its new Chromebook-based curriculum to great fanfare and applause, almost all of which was generated by the D-64 Board and Administration.

We wrote about it in our 07.21.14 post and our 08/26/14 post.

The Chromebooks were going to be the latest “magic bullet” for raising the District’s stagnant-to-sliding academic performance – as demonstrated by those pesky standardized test that provide those annoying objectively-measurable test results. Or maybe they were only intended to be $778,000 worth of new shiny objects to divert attention away from those test scores and related rankings.

Anybody who dared question the power and accuracy of this latest “magic bullet” was ridiculed as old fashioned, an unenlightened naysayer, and/or anti-child. That’s the strategy of choice by the “professional” education establishment, although just typing those words makes us laugh.

So far, however, we’ve neither seen nor heard about any improvement in academic performance. And if one entertains the possibility that the performance of Maine South students is affected by the educational quality of its D-64 feeder schools, the slide in Maine South’s performance becomes a tad ominous.

So we have to shake our head over a recent Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article reported (“All Chromebooks to be replaced in District 64, officials say,” May 2) how all of the District’s 2,782 “Generation 1” Chromebooks are going to be replaced, reportedly free of charge, with “Generation 2” Chromebooks by the manufacturer, Dell. The reason: more than half of them underwent repairs just this year alone, including a 25% breakdown rate for the computers’ logic boards.

The H-A article places the District’s cost of those repairs at $103,000 worth of parts and labor. So far, there’s no word from D-64 as to whether Dell will reimburse the District for those costs.

Two years ago the chief D-64 propagandist, Bernadette Tramm – still on the job today, sad to say – and a coterie of her sub-spinners were assuring anyone who would listen that those Generation 1 Chromebooks would have a four-year life cycle. Less than two full years later, however, Mary Jane Warden, the District’s director of innovation and instructional technology, and Finance Czarina Luann Kolstad are singing a very different tune.

“Expecting a product like a Chromebook to last a full four years of wear and tear may be too ambitious to sustain.”

What a difference two years makes.

We can’t figure out how Warden and the District’s other tech gurus didn’t see this coming two years ago because, according to Warden’s and Kolstad’s memo to the D-64 Board, “the Chromebooks are so new to the market, [and] there has been no history of product reliability or performance that we can put full confidence in.” But two years ago there was even less of a history.

Not surprisingly, that didn’t stop Warden from recommending the purchase of, or our School Board members and administrators from spending $778,000 of the taxpayers’ money on, 2,782 of the untried and unreliable critters.

And now they’re going to replace the Generation 1 Chromebook with Generation 2 Chromebooks, even though – according to Warden – Dell has not explained why the Generation 1s failed.

“I’m confident going forward we’ll have a better product,” she told the school board.

Just as confident as she was two years ago.

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