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Silicon Valley Wows Educators, and Woos Them
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SAN FRANCISCO — Three times over the last two years, school officials from Little Falls, Minn., have escaped the winter cold for two-day trips to Silicon Valley. Their destination: the headquarters of Apple.
In visits the officials described as inspirational, they checked out the company’s latest gadgets, discussed the instructional value of computers with high-level Apple executives and engineers, and dined with them and other educators at trendy restaurants. Apple paid for meals and their stay at a nearby inn.
The visits paid off for Apple too — to the tune of $1.2 million in sales. In September, Little Falls handed out iPads to 1,700 of its 2,500 students at a celebration in the school gym. And a few days earlier, 200 teachers got a pep talk via video chat from an Apple executive whom the school superintendent had come to know during his company visits.
“Both my visits there have been extraordinary,” said Curt Tryggestad, superintendent of the Little Falls Community Schools, who visited Cupertino in 2010 and earlier this year. “I was truly amazed to sit in a room with Apple vice presidents, people who were second in command to Steve Jobs.”
The demand for technology in classrooms has given rise to a slick and fast-growing sales force. Makers of computers and other gear vigorously court educators as they vie for billions of dollars in school financing. Sometimes inviting criticism of their zealous marketing, they pitch via e-mail, make cold calls, arrange luncheons and hold community meetings.
But Apple in particular woos the education market with a state-of-the art sales operation that educators say is unique, and that, public-interest watchdogs say, raises some concerns. Along with more traditional methods, Apple invites educators from around the country to “executive briefings,” which participants describe as equal parts conversation, seminar and backstage pass.
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Such events might seem unremarkable in the business world, where closing a deal can involve thinly veiled junkets, golf outings and lavish dinners. But the courtship of public school officials entrusted with tax dollars is a more sensitive matter. Some critics say the trips could cast doubt on the impartiality of the officials’ buying decisions, which shape the way millions of students learn.
Mike Dean, a spokesman for Common Cause of Minnesota, a nonpartisan group that promotes open government, was critical of the Apple visits, calling them “influence peddling.” He said he believed that a Minnesota law prohibiting government officials from accepting “anything of value” from contractors would apply to the hotel stay and dinners. And he said Apple was offering an experience that made potential buyers feel like insiders.
“There is a geek culture that very much worships Apple, and they’re feeding into that to get more contracts.”
Apple declined to discuss the executive briefings. Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for the company, said education was “in its DNA.” As to the public employees who participate in the trips, Ms. Kerris said: “We advise them to follow their local regulations.”
Broadly, efforts by technology vendors to get close to educators are becoming more sophisticated, said John Richards, an adjunct lecturer at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, where he teaches about education and technology.
“What the textbook sellers had perfected for years has moved into the high-tech world,” said Mr. Richards, who also works as a consultant for technology companies in the education market.
The sales pitches come as questions persist about how effective high-tech products can be at improving student achievement. The companies say their products engage students and prepare them for a digital future, while some academics say technology is not fulfilling its promise.
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Even Mr. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, turned skeptical about technology’s ability to improve education. In a new biography of Mr. Jobs, the book’s author, Walter Isaacson, describes a conversation earlier this year between the ailing Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, in which the two men “agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools — far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law.”
The comments echo similar ones Mr. Jobs made in 1996, between his two stints at Apple. In an interview with Wired magazine, Mr. Jobs said that “what’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology,” even though he had himself “spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet.” Mr. Jobs blamed teachers’ unions for the decline in education.
Still, Mr. Jobs seemed to hold out hope that devices like the iPad could change things by replacing printed textbooks. Mr. Isaacson writes that the textbook market was the next big business Mr. Jobs hoped to disrupt with technology.
The executive briefings on Apple’s campus have been going on for more than a decade, but have received little attention, partly because participants sign nondisclosure agreements that are meant to protect the company’s technical and business secrets.
Matt Mello, director of technology for the Holly Area Schools in Oakland County, Mich., went on a two-day trip to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in April 2010, and his description of it is similar to those of other participants.
Mr. Mello chronicled his visit using the Moleskine notebook Apple gave him. On the first day, he said, there was a light breakfast at the hotel, a ride to Apple’s campus and a briefing around a U-shaped conference table that began with company executives asking the educators about their needs. The latest Apple laptops and other products were scattered around the room. They had lunch in the gourmet cafeteria, where Mr. Mello sampled a bit of everything, and visited the company store.
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“I joked that I felt like we were on hallowed ground,” Mr. Mello said of the campus. “There’s this mystique.”
Still, Mr. Mello said he was not sure what would come of a trip that had developed a few months earlier, when the regional sales representative for Apple “snuck a MacBook under my nose and got me to try it.” Soon, he said, the district was conducting a test with 30 Apple laptops and considering whether to upgrade hundreds of Windows-based computers or switch to Apple.
Mr. Mello said the sales representative told him: “If you guys are serious, we could get you an invitation to an executive briefing in Cupertino.”
The representative traveled to Cupertino for the meeting but hung in the background. The sales team wore ties, and the engineers and executives dressed casually. Sales pitches took a back seat to conversations and presentations about how students use computers. One video showed a 10-year-old boy talking about creating podcasts with a MacBook.
The group met with a local participant in Apple’s “distinguished educator” program, Ted Lai, who talked about podcasting in schools. Then, in a room called the Jim Henson Studio, they learned to create podcasts using iMovie software. Soon, Mr. Mello was convinced.
“We went there with our eyes open but hesitant. What could be so compelling as to get us to move off our base? And they did it,” Mr. Mello said. What swayed him, he said, were the presentations but also the company’s bright new monitors: “We were looking at each other thinking, ‘Wow. I can’t believe these are available at this price point.’ ”
Since then the district has switched to Apple, giving 350 laptops to teachers in 2010 and, this fall, 450 iPads and computers to high school students. The price: $637,000.
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Mr. Mello was joined on the trip by two principals, two assistant superintendents and a teacher. Apple paid for meals and a stay at the Inn at Saratoga, near the Apple campus, where rates run $189 for a single room that looks onto a tranquil creek. Airfare was not included. And the group did not let Apple pick up the drink tab at the hotel, Mr. Mello said, noting: “As a school district, we’re conscious of that sort of thing.”
Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a nonprofit watchdog group, said he did not believe the educators were violating state law. But he said the ethical issue seemed to be a gray area for public officials. “It’s acceptable business ethics,” he said. “It’s not good public ethics.”
For his part, Mr. Mello said he did not think the Apple perks had influenced him. But he said he believed that Apple, by inviting his district, which is relatively wealthy, was seeking to influence other Michigan schools. In fact, he said he was told as much by a senior sales executive during dinner at a Silicon Valley Latin American restaurant.
The executive even offered to throw in about $20,000 of wireless equipment, but the district declined because it already had other plans, Mr. Mello said.
Mr. Robinson and other watchdogs said state ethics rules were not uniform and varied widely. For instance, school officials in Nebraska, several of whom have visited Apple this year, are prohibited from accepting meals and hotels only if they agree to buy products in exchange, an overt quid pro quo that no one is suggesting is taking place.
In all, about 30 states have laws restricting gifts to state officials, laws that might invite scrutiny of Apple’s generosity, said Karen Hobert Flynn, vice president of state operations for Common Cause.
In Microsoft’s case, the company covers airfare, hotels and meals for participants in its events for teachers. It also invites administrators and school technology staff to regional meetings that aim to help them solve technical issues. Because those meetings include people who can be involved in purchasing computers and other gear, Microsoft does not pay for travel or hotels.
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额外
And in the case of both the teacher meetings and the technical briefings, Microsoft requires that attendees bring a letter certifying that if they accept meals or any other perks, they will not be violating local, state or federal ethics laws, according to Kevin Hartley, associate general counsel at the company.
There is sensitivity about these issues on the educators’ side as well. In September, a group of state officials and educators in Idaho canceled a trip to Microsoft because they worried it might appear as if the trip had unfairly influenced any eventual purchase of Microsoft products.
Mr. Tryggestad from Little Falls said that Apple did not push him to take anything that would violate state law, and that he did not think he or anyone in the district had done so.
When he went on his first visit to Apple in 2010, Mr. Tryggestad was joined by about a dozen other Minnesota superintendents. On his second visit this February, the group spent an afternoon at Stanford University talking to students and faculty who were experimenting with educational uses of technology.
In March, the district technology director visited Apple in a group that included his counterparts from schools in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. Less than a month later, the Little Falls school board approved the big iPad purchase.
At the time the district was curious to see how students’ test scores would be affected by the use of the new devices, but the test results from one school’s pilot project last year would not be available for months. And the district decided not to wait, Mr. Tryggestad said, given the enthusiasm for the device among students and teachers.
Mr. Tryggestad said he believed Apple invited him to its campus (and also to larger education meetings in Dallas and Chicago) because he had some influence. He sits on the board of the Minnesota Rural Education Association, a lobbying group, and is on a state advisory committee for online learning.
“Maybe they looked at me as being a conduit,” he said.
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越障
The presidential race one year out
America’s missing middle
The coming presidential election badly needs a shot of centrist pragmatismIT IS a year until Americans go to the polls, on November 6th 2012, to decide whether Barack Obama deserves another term. In January the Republicans start voting in their primaries, with the favourite, Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, facing fading competition from Herman Cain, a pizza tycoon, and Rick Perry, the governor of Texas. Already American politics has succumbed to election paralysis, with neither party interested in bipartisan solutions.
This would be a problem at the best of times; and these times are very far from that. Strikingly, by about three to one, Americans feel their country is on the wrong track. America’s sovereign debt has been downgraded. Unemployment remains stubbornly above 9%, with the long-term unemployed making up the largest proportion of the jobless since records began in 1948. As the superpower’s clout seems to ebb towards Asia, the world’s most consistently inventive and optimistic country has lost its mojo.
Some of this distress was inevitable. Whatever the country’s leaders did in Washington, the credit crunch was always going to cause a lot of suffering. Rising inequality, unfunded pensions and bad schools are not new problems. But politics, far from offering a remedy, is now adding to the national angst. Eight out of ten Americans mistrust their government. There is a sense that their political system, like their economy, has been skewed to favour the few, not the many.
The European Union may seem the epitome of political dysfunction, but America has been running it close. All this year the deadlock between the Republicans in Congress and Mr Obama has meant that precious little serious legislation has been passed. The president’s jobs bill is stuck; the House of Representatives’ budget plans have been scuppered by the Democrat-controlled Senate. At the end of this year temporary tax cuts and other measures, worth around 2% of GDP, are set to expire—which could push America back into recession.
Surrender to extremists
On the face of it, neither side has gained from this stand-off. Only 45% of Americans approve of Mr Obama’s performance. The approval rating for Congress dropped to 9% in one recent poll. A plurality of Americans call themselves independents, and on the most divisive economic argument—how to solve the budget mess—two in three of them back a combination of spending cuts and tax rises. But politics is being driven by extremists who reject any such compromise (see article).
The right is mostly to blame. Ronald Reagan, a divorcee who did little for the pro-life lobby and raised taxes when he had to, would never be nominated today. Mr Romney, like all the Republican presidential candidates, recently pledged to reject tax rises, even as part of a deal where spending cuts would be ten times bigger. Mr Cain surged briefly to the front of the pack because of a plan that would cut personal taxes to 9% (see Lexington); Mr Perry lost support for wanting to educate the children of illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, in Congress, the few remaining pragmatic Republican centrists, like Senator Richard Lugar, are being hunted down by tea-party activists.
Mr Obama has tried harder to compromise. But he foolishly failed to embrace a long-term budget solution put forward by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission, which he himself appointed. Ever since the furore over the debt ceiling this summer, he has “pivoted” to the left, dabbling in class war, promising his supporters that the budget can be solved by taxing “millionaires and billionaires”. He is also trying to issue more executive orders, to bypass Congress (see article).
The divisiveness is hardly new, but it is increasingly structural. As the battle for billions of campaign dollars heats up, neither side dares grant the other any modicum of success, or risk the ire of its donors by appearing to compromise. Gerrymandered districts mean that most congressmen fear their partisans in the primaries more than their opponents in the general election. Ever more divisive media feed the activists’ prejudices. So, at worst, a bitter contest could merely reinforce the gridlock, with a re-elected, more leftish Comrade Obama pitted against a still more intransigent Republican Congress.
Wishing on a star
In other countries such a huge gap in the middle would see the creation of a third party to represent the alienated majority. Imagine a presidential candidate next year who spelled out the need for deep future cuts in spending on entitlements and defence, as well as the need to raise some revenue (largely by getting rid of deductions); who explained that the pain would be applied only after the recovery was solidly in place; who avoided class or culture wars; who discussed school reform without fear of the Democrats’ paymasters in the teachers’ unions. Better still, imagine a new centrist block in Congress, which might give that candidate (or for that matter a President Obama or Romney) something to work with in 2013.
And so the fantasy continues, for that is sadly what it is. Even if the money were forthcoming, there are all sorts of institutional barriers, especially to starting new parties, and the record of even very well-heeled third-party presidential candidates is bleak. Instead, the middle will have to be recreated from what is already there.
The immediate, rather slim, chance is of a grand bargain on the budget emerging out of a congressional “supercommittee” set up after the debt-ceiling fiasco. If it were to embrace a centrist option, politics over the next year would be considerably more civilised. But it too appears deadlocked, with the Republicans once again ruling out tax increases of any kind.
So, back to the campaign. It is not entirely without hope. You can win the White House only by winning that disenfranchised middle. For Mr Romney and his party the danger is clear: the Republicans’ intolerant obstructionism could drive independents away. But Mr Obama also has a lot to prove. Why re-elect a man who has failed to unite Americans? Now should surely be the time for the president to seize the centre ground. Otherwise, in a year’s time he may well see his own name added to the rolls of those who have lost their job.
OG
Passage 32 (32/63)
Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the staggering disparity between the indigenous population of America in 1492—new estimates of which soar as high as 100 million, or approximately one-sixth of the human race at that time—and the few million full-blooded Native Americans alive at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that chronic disease was an important factor in the precipitous decline, and it is highly probable that the greatest killer was epidemic disease, especially as manifested in virgin-soil epidemics.
Virgin-soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless. That virgin-soil epidemics were important in American history is strongly indicated by evidence that a number of dangerous maladies—smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more—were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World. The effects of their sudden introduction are demonstrated in the early chronicles of America, which contain reports of horrendous epidemics and steep population declines, confirmed in many cases by recent quantitative analyses of Spanish tribute records and other sources. The evidence provided by the documents of British and French colonies is not as definitive because the conquerors of those areas did not establish permanent settlements and begin to keep continuous records until the seventeenth century, by which time the worst epidemics had probably already taken place. Furthermore, the British tended to drive the native populations away, rather than enslaving them as the Spaniards did, so that the epidemics of British America occurred beyond the range of colonists’ direct observation.
Even so, the surviving records of North America do contain references to deadly epidemics among the indigenous population. In 1616-1619 an epidemic, possibly of bubonic or pneumonic plague, swept coastal New England, killing as many as nine out of ten. During the 1630’s smallpox, the disease most fatal to the Native American people, eliminated half the population of the Huron and Iroquois confederations. In the 1820’s fever devastated the people of the Columbia River area, killing eight out of ten of them.
Unfortunately, the documentation of these and other epidemics is slight and frequently unreliable, and it is necessary to supplement what little we do know with evidence from recent epidemics among Native Americans. For example, in 1952 an outbreak of measles among the Native American inhabitants of Ungava Bay, Quebec, affected 99 percent of the population and killed 7 percent, even though some had the benefit of modern medicine. Cases such as this demonstrate that even diseases that are not normally fatal can have devastating consequences when they strike an immunologically defenseless community.
1. The primary purpose of the passage is to
(A) refute a common misconception
(B) provide support for a hypothesis
(C) analyze an argument
(D) suggest a solution to a dilemma
(E) reconcile opposing viewpoints
2. According to the passage, virgin-soil epidemics can be distinguished from other catastrophic outbreaks of disease in that virgin-soil epidemics
(A) recur more frequently than other chronic diseases
(B) affect a minimum of one-half of a given population
(C) involve populations with no prior exposure to a disease
(D) usually involve a number of interacting diseases
(E) are less responsive to medical treatment than are other diseases
3. According to the passage, the British colonists were unlike the Spanish colonists in that the British colonists
(A) collected tribute from the native population
(B) kept records from a very early date
(C) drove Native Americans off the land
(D) were unable to provide medical care against epidemic disease
(E) enslaved the native populations in America
4. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage concerning Spanish tribute records?
(A) They mention only epidemics of smallpox.
(B) They were instituted in 1492.
(C) They were being kept prior to the seventeenth century.
(D) They provide quantitative and qualitative evidence about Native American populations.
(E) They prove that certain diseases were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World.
5. The author implies which of the following about measles?
(A) It is not usually a fatal disease.
(B) It ceased to be a problem by the seventeenth century.
(C) It is the disease most commonly involved in virgin-soil epidemics.
(D) It was not a significant problem in Spanish colonies.
(E) It affects only those who are immunologically defenseless against it.
6. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage about the Native American inhabitants of Ungava Bay?
(A) They were almost all killed by the 1952 epidemic.
(B) They were immunologically defenseless against measles.
(C) They were the last native people to be struck by a virgin-soil epidemic.
(D) They did not come into frequent contact with white Americans until the twentieth century.
(E) They had been inoculated against measles.
7. The author mentions the 1952 measles outbreak most probably in order to
(A) demonstrate the impact of modern medicine on epidemic disease
(B) corroborate the documentary evidence of epidemic disease in colonial America
(C) refute allegations of unreliability made against the historical record of colonial America
(D) advocate new research into the continuing problem of epidemic disease
(E) challenge assumptions about how the statistical evidence of epidemics should be interpreted
8. Which of the following, if newly discovered, would most seriously weaken the author’s argument concerning the importance of virgin-soil epidemics in the depopulation of Native Americans?
(A) Evidence setting the pre-Columbian population of the New World at only 80 million
(B) Spanish tribute records showing periodic population fluctuations
(C) Documents detailing sophisticated Native American medical procedures
(D) Fossils indicating Native American contact with smallpox prior to 1492
(E) Remains of French settlements dating back to the sixteenth century
答案：BCCC ABBD
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发表于 2011-11-5 22:31:03
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