When Los Angeles schools began handing out iPads in the fall of 2013, it looked like one of the country's most ambitious rollouts of technology in the classroom. The city's school district planned to spend $1.3 billion putting iPads, preloaded with the Pearson curriculum, in the hands of every student in every school.

Less than two years later, that ambitious plan now looks like a spectacularly foolish one. In August, the Los Angeles Unified School District halted its contract with Apple, as rumors swirled that Apple and Pearson may have received preferential treatment in the district’s procurement process, something the FBI is investigating. Then, this spring, the district sent a letter to Apple seeking a refund, citing crippling technical issues with the Pearson platform and incomplete curriculum that made it nearly impossible for teachers to teach. If a deal can’t be reached, the district could take legal action. (Apple did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment.)

Pearson, whose stock tumbled following the news, has publicly defended the curriculum it provided LAUSD, which included digital learning content for math and English courses 1. LAUSD's director of the so-called Instructional Technology Initiative, on the other hand, denounced the material as utterly unusable in a memo earlier this year.

But while the the parties involved continue pointing the finger and picking up the pieces, the important question to ask now is what this fiasco means for the future of technology in the classroom. If one of the country’s largest school districts, one of the world’s largest tech companies, and one of the most established brands in education can’t make it work, can anyone?

No one wants to be the next LA Unified. Michael Horn

Experts who have been following LAUSD's troubled tech rollout say that while this does not mean education technology is inherently flawed, it does illustrate just how difficult a program like this is to pull off. Rather than proving these programs are hopeless, they say LA may have provided other districts and tech providers with an unfortunate, yet vivid, blueprint of what not to do. Learning from LA's mistakes, they say, is critical to ensuring that already resource-strapped schools won't continue spending precious funding on misguided programs.

"No one wants to be the next LA Unified," says Michael Horn, executive director of the education program at the Clay Christensen Institute. "I think that's healthy, and it will get people to pause and learn the bigger lesson."

'The Classic Case'

According to Horn, who also is author of Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, Los Angeles is a classic case of a school district getting caught up in the ed tech frenzy without fully thinking through why technology is important in the first place.

"LA is emblematic of a problem we're seeing across the country right now," he says. "Districts are starting with the technology and not asking themselves: ‘What problem are we trying to solve, and what’s the instructional model we need to solve it?’ and then finding technology in service of that."

At the crux of the FBI’s investigation into LA's iPad program are emails exchanged between then-Superintendent John Deasy and executives from Pearson, in which Deasy expresses his excitement about being able to work with Pearson and Apple. The only problem is, the emails were sent a year before LAUSD started the bidding process with other vendors, indicating the deck was stacked before the district had a chance to vet other providers or come up with a comprehensive plan for using and managing the technology.

It’s not unusual even in an above-board bidding process for districts to start by choosing a vendor, instead of first discussing how that technology will be used in the first place

That's an extreme example, Horn admits. But he says it's not unusual even in an above-board bidding process for districts to start by choosing a vendor, instead of first discussing how that technology will be used in the first place.

"A lot of schools get into trouble when the conversation starts with the vendor," Horn says. "Where I’ve seen these programs work is when the school starts off with its vision, and only once they’ve sketched out what the solution should look like do they go out to the hardware and software communities to mix and match to meet those needs."

The Milpitas Model

That was the approach that Cary Matsuoka, Superintendent of California's Milpitas Unified School District, took when he began bringing Chromebooks into district schools in 2012. Milpitas, a town of 70,000 outside San Jose, often is held up as a successful example of how technology can enable more personalized education, even in a district school setting, and that has a lot to do with how Matsuoka went about designing the program. In spring 2012, he challenged principals throughout the district to present a compelling answer to the question: If you could design the school of the future, what would it look like?

The goal, Matsuoka says, was to give principals and teachers the autonomy to determine what would work best for their schools rather than mandating change from the top. "Any time you control things from the top, you get compliance, where people just go through the motions," Matsuoka says. "We wanted to say: 'Here's the model. Come up with your version of it and go test it.'"

Any time you control things from the top, you get compliance, where people just go through the motions.' Cary Matsuoka

It was through that process that Matsuoka realized having one device per student wasn’t actually necessary. Instead, the principals proposed a rotation model, in which students would take shifts on the devices. "Part of that was about cost" Matsuoka admits, "but there’s also the important question to ask, which is, what would you do if you had the one-to-one environment? How would you take advantage of that?"

Instead, Milpitas started with 2,000 Chromebooks, because they're less expensive than iPads and are cloud-based, so they can be centrally managed and updated. Now, the district has 6,000 Chromebooks for 10,000 students and may continue to scale, depending on which schools and classrooms could benefit from more devices.

The Curriculum Problem

But the abundance of expensive hardware wasn't the central problem in LA. It was Pearson's curriculum that proved most troublesome. In her memo, Bernadette Lucas, the initiative's director, wrote that less than 5 percent of students had consistent access to the content due to technical issues, and that some students had no access at all for months. As of March, all but two schools had stopped using the Pearson curriculum entirely.

In a statement to WIRED, a Pearson spokesperson said, "This was a large-scale implementation of new technologies and there have been challenges with the initial adoption, but we stand by the quality of our performance."

For Horn, such problems occur when ed tech companies design their software in a vacuum. "A lot of people will say, 'Our program works great when you use it for this long and in this way,'" he says. "The question is: Do schools use it that way?'"

You can make a change that makes sense on its own, but when it’s introduced to the complex setting of a school, the net effect is negative.' Max Ventilla

That's one reason startups like AltSchool are working on building schools and technology simultaneously. "It is so hard to be the setting in which a child learns in a school that if you don't run schools yourself, and deal with all the practicalities around everything from technology to lunch to transportation, you risk missing everything below the water line," says Max Ventilla, founder and CEO of AltSchool.

"What’s tough about education is things are so complex and connected that sometimes, you can make a change that makes sense on its own, but when it’s introduced to the complex setting of a school, the net effect is negative."

And yet, according to Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, the stodgy education procurement system isn't always set up to find the best technology solutions for schools, regardless of how that technology was designed. "There's a rising tension between the folks who want to move new tools and learning programs into school systems and a pretty archaic procurement system that can easily stand in the way," she says. "Smaller companies are saying, 'We just don't have a chance against the big companies."

Lake says that is the fatal mistake LAUSD made, but the district is not alone. "School systems in general do not do a good job on R&D," she says. "They're built to work with one or two companies that will provide a one-size-fits-all solution, and that's not how technology is moving."

Horn agrees, adding that while schools need more thoughtful ways of selecting tech vendors, the vendors need to be more thoughtful about selling to schools. "Of course device companies are trying to sell devices, but if they don't want this big blowback on edtech, then it'd be prudent to take a long term mindset and really help these districts think through a more strategic planning process before they implement the program."

Lake says some cities, like New York, have found ways around this procurement problem. In 2010, the Big Apple launched its so-called iZone program, which was designed specifically to connect startups and developers to the city's schools. "New York said, 'We actually have to cultivate a marketplace if we want to find these solutions," says Lake, who hopes to see more cities taking New York's lead.

Not Giving Up

Los Angeles, for its part, says it's not giving up on technology in the classroom. "We’re still very much moving forward in technology and continuing to deliver devices to schools," a spokesperson for the district told WIRED.

For now, the iPads with Pearson's curriculum are still being used in 58 schools, but students and teachers are using them simply to access other apps. Meanwhile, after cutting short its initial contract with Apple and Pearson, last winter, LA's school board approved another $40 million for more iPads, as well as Chromebooks. Those devices aren't loaded with Pearson's content and are being used exclusively for testing.

The difference is now, under the leadership of Superintendent Ramon Cortines, the district is trying to learn from its mistakes and do some serious strategic planning before expanding the program further. The district has formed a task force, which will develop a new plan for using technology in the classroom and present it to the superintendent and school board next year.

Los Angeles has not given up on technology in the classroom.

The group has four key questions: What will students learn? How will students learn? What resources will be needed? How will it work? These are questions anyone can see the district should have asked long before it purchased a single iPad. But they are critical questions to ask, no matter how late they may be.

During the task force's first meeting in April, Cortines emphasized how critical this process was in a statement to members, “You have a monumental job ahead of you," he said. "We have spent more than $100 million dollars on this project and it is now time to regroup and develop a solid plan that allows us to move forward and leverage technology as a tool to improve teaching and learning for our students."

1. Update 2:15 ET 05/08/2015: This story has been updated to include an explanation of the Pearson curriculum.