Executives at the Cupertino, Calif., company are seriously considering this possibility after another school district found the devices are supplanting learning for gaming and other distractions. In a student-teacher study conducted by the Maine Department of Education, 88.5 percent of teachers and 74 percent of students preferred laptops over iPads.
The blog site Quartz, which initially reported results, said statements from teachers expressed strong opposition with criticisms like “iPads are a disaster,” “word processing is near to impossible,” and “We need laptops!”
This was followed by a surprising turnabout from Apple, a company that rarely makes concessions, with a trade-in offer for Maine schools to exchange iPads purchased in 2013 for new MacBook Air laptops free of charge. So far, this is expected to translate into more than 1,700 laptop trades for two schools with more to follow.
“If we had known how big a transition it would have been [to switch] from laptops to iPads we would have proactively done some good work with teachers to make the transition easier for them,” Mike Muir, the policy director of the Maine Learning Through Technology Initiative, told Quartz. More than 1,700 laptops will be delivered to two schools later this year.
With the step away from tablets, Maine educators join a group of the districts in Texas, North Carolina, and the district of Los Angeles — the second largest in the nation — that are abandoning or prohibiting the use of tablets by students in the classroom. Similarly, there are private schools like the Waldorf School in San Diego that have marketed device-free classrooms as a selling point — something certain Silicon Valley tech executives have endorsed by enrolling their own children.
The trend is disappointing for Apple, which has invested millions to market iPad as an educational learning device, and also for developers, who have dedicated resources to building educational apps to enhance teaching methods. Apple has pledged $100 million alone, through the White House’s ConnectED initiative, to donate an iPad to every student and teacher in 114 underserved schools — in addition to other classroom devices and teaching solutions.
The iPads struggles persist in the consumer market as well. Quartz reported that at the end of 2015, iPad sales fell to their lowest point since June 2011.
Even so, while the devices might not be suitable for the average classroom, they might still serve educational purposes under tighter supervision or in different applications. For example, in another study in 2012, Muir said that iPads had dramatically increased literacy scores for kindergartners. At the college level, the University of California at Irvine reported in 2013 that its medical students that were first given iPads scored an average of 23 percent higher on national exams than their peers — even with comparable incoming GPA and MCAT scores.
To prevent the iPad’s continuing fallout in education, Apple may have to rethink its uses, especially as new models — like its large 12.9-inch and 9.7-inch iPad Pros — attempt to lure more customers.
